How the West Won--Part 2

This is a second blog dealing with Rodney Stark' s eye-opening book called How the West Won, which dispels lots of modern politically correct ideas about the last 1000 years.

Stark begins by looking at the accomplishments of the Greeks. Their superiority lay in warfare, democracy, economic progress, literacy, the arts, and technology. In addition, the ancient Greeks took the single most significant step toward the rise of Western science when they proposed that the universe is orderly and governed by underlying principles that the human mind could discern through observation and reason. He says these successes were based on many independent, competitive city-states. This progress stagnated as these city-states were submerged beneath new empires. This will be a constant theme of Stark's book – that independence and small government produces far more progress than large, heavily bureaucratic governments. That sounds familiar today with the terrible results of Obamacare, the IRS, Fast and Furious, and other failures of the Obama administration.

Stark then says the idea of progress, so important in the West, was inherent in Jewish conceptions of history and was central to Christian thought from very early days. Add to this the Christian belief in man's rational nature and also in God himself as the epitome of reason. Stark quotes the philosopher John Macmurray, who says," That we think of progress at all shows the extent of the influence of Christianity upon us." To show the uniqueness of the Western approach, Stark looks at life under Islam. Muslims believe strongly in the idea of decline and hold that the universe is inherently irrational – that there is no cause and effect – because everything happens as the direct result of Allah's will at that particular time. Anything is possible. Attempts at science, then, are not only foolish but also blasphemous, in that they imply limits to Allah's power and authority. Later on in the book, Stark will take on the idea that Muslims produced much science and learning. He shows this was only because of the culture sustained by the people the Muslims had conquered.

At the end of chapter 2, Stark points out that throughout the remainder of his book he will demonstrate how the Christian conception of God as the rational creator of a comprehensible universe, who therefore expects the humans will become increasingly sophisticated and informed, continually prodded the West  along the road to modernity.